IN THE MAD MOUNTAINS
By Joe R. Lansdale
Fiction / Horror
Publisher: Tachyon Publications
Pages: 256
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
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*** SYNOPSIS ***
“Joe Lansdale squares up to the Great Old Ones―and taps into rich veins of awe and wit, with always a backbeat thrum of cosmic terror.” Kim Newman, author of the Anno Dracula series
Eleven-time Bram Stoker Award-winner Joe R. Lansdale (Bubba Ho-tep) returns with this wicked short story collection of his irreverent Lovecraftian tributes. Lansdale is terrifyingly down-home while merging his classic gonzo stylings with the eldritch horrors of H. P. Lovecraft. Knowingly skewering Lovecraft’s paranoid mythos, Lansdale embarks upon haunting yet sly explorations of the unknown, capturing the essence of cosmic dread.
A sinister blues recording pressed on vinyl in blood conjures lethal shadows with its unearthly wails. In order to rescue Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn traverses the shifting horrors of the aptly named Dread Island. In the weird Wild West, Reverend Jebidiah Mercer rides into a possessed town to confront the unspeakable in the crawling sky. Legendary detective C. Auguste Dupin uncovers the gruesome secrets of both the blue lightning bug and the Necronomicon.
Exploring the darkest corners of the human psyche, here is a lethally entertaining journey through Joe Lansdale’s twisted landscape, where ancient evils lurk and sanity hangs by a rapidly fraying thread.
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Tachyon Publications | Amazon
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*** REVIEW ***
A delightfully creepy collection.
One thing you can always count on when reading a book by Joe R. Lansdale is the mastery of craft that is illustrated so well in this collection of short stories. While they all carry the central theme found in much of Lovecraft’s work, the stories are told in such a way that there is a clear distinction of voice. You couldn’t take a character from one story and have him or her tell the next one.
The refined detective C. Auguste Dupin recounts his experience in long monologues, as one would expect in a man of his time, but he couldn’t tell the story of Gavin and Amelia, who are up against the Mad Mountains. Theirs was a more physical adventure, as opposed to intellectual, and the beauty of all the stories is that Lansdale lets the characters speak, each in their own way.
The story featuring Huck Finn and his friend, Jim, who set off to rescue Tom Sawyer from “Dread Island” is told in a way that would make Mark Twain smile. Except for the horror elements, it was much like reading the original Huckleberry Finn. And the Reverend Jebediah Mercer from “The Crawling Sky” could ride his horse into any of the great western novels from Louis L’Amour – minus the creepy monster that wants to eat people.
An ongoing theme in Lovecraft’s work is how mankind is irrelevant in the face of cosmic horrors that apparently exist in some alternate universe. And each of the stories in this collection reflects that irrelevance to some degree, or totally. Some of those cosmic horrors do unbelievable, horrific things to the people who happen to break some small web of protection between us and them. Horrible creatures intent on eating humans, or pulling off heads to suck a body dry of blood, live on that other side of the universe, just waiting for a hapless victim yo breach their realm.
Pretty scary stuff if real, and Lansdale achieves his goal of making us very wary of walking toward any dark void, or toward the funny thing we might see in the distance.
It was a delightful surprise to finish the book and realize that I read every word of each story. Since I’m not a fan of the horror genre and generally skim over the more gruesome passages of a book I might read for review, I thought I’d do the same here. But I got so caught up in the lives of the characters and how their relationships evolved during the story, that I forgot to be grossed out at the carnage and the ugly beings that slid and slimed toward their victims.
Making us care about the people in the stories is part of that mastery of craft that I mentioned earlier. Every Lansdale novel that I’ve read does the same thing. Makes me care so much about the people that I have a hard time putting the book down.
Lansdale also has a gift for writing compelling descriptions in his narrative, such as this from the title story: “Sharks began to jump from the waves as easy as flying fish. They grabbed the star-heads in their toothy mouths, crunched them like dry toast, then pulled the remains of their squirming meals into the deep. More sharks came and went, like a pack of wolves, cutting through the blood-slick waters, snapping at the star-heads quickly, darting away and under, only to rise and circle back and strike again.”
Sometimes reviewers are asked which story they liked best in a collection, but please don’t ask me. They’re all wonderfully creepy and wonderfully written. Highly recommended for fans of horror stories, and even those who aren’t fans.
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*** ABOUT THE AUTHOR ***
Joe R. Lansdale is the author of nearly four dozen novels, including Rusty Puppy, the Edgar-award winning The Bottoms, Sunset and Sawdust, and Leather Maiden. He has received nine Bram Stoker Awards, the American Mystery Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Grinzane Cavour Prize for Literature. He lives with his family in Nacogdoches, Texas.
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